by Jane Gardam
‘She’s beautiful,’ said old Jack and put her in the paper, which is to say The Times: ‘To Jack and Marjorie Partridge, a daughter, Olivia,’ and entered her name for Sherborne School and took out another couple of insurance policies. The satisfaction he felt about Olivia became the deep part of his life. He was unconcerned that no other child followed her. Neither parent was young.
Olivia went first to Mrs. Parsons’s nice little school on the Common which didn’t fuss about examinations like the High School. The little girls spent a great deal of time doing Nature, with Miss Phillips puffing behind them up to Caesar’s Camp. Twice a week they played Rounders under the twisted chestnut tree opposite South Side, which had given shelter to generations of Wimbledon nannies even before Robert Graves was patted under it in his pram by Swinburne. It was gentle Rounders, and consisted largely in Miss Phillips’s calling out encouragement and shaking tidy the heap of brown cardigans that were used as bases; and in the making of daisy chains. Marjorie, striding by on a walk with the dog, used to pretend not to see Livie, thoughtfully fielding, for she knew that a child must develop its private life at school.
Which—the Partridges never put a foot wrong, ever—Livie did. She was clearly very clever, and so self-reliant that at seven she was making two or three trips a week to the Public Library down the hill.
The parent Partridges, living in Rathbone Road, had no need of down-the-hill themselves. Jack was a member of the London Library which took care of books. Friends, shops, restaurants, fresh air, exercise, Church (Livie was not deprived of the chance of Christianity though her parents were not believers and they explained this to her) were all available within the enclave. Jack did not even have to walk down the hill to the station but took a bus to Putney and then the tube. Chauffeurs were for foreigners and the media people on Drax Avenue and Parkside.
But Olivia devoured books so fast that the down-the-hill library was vital to her and she was found sitting—aged eight—in the Reference Room in Compton Road among all the hackers and spitters and tramps clinking bottles and old creatures taking grey sandwiches out of paper bags, and looking very happy. It shocked her mother who rousted her out. ‘My dear!’ she said to her friends. ‘She was oblivious. You know, she is off this earth!’
‘Oblivious Olivious,’ said Jack. ‘Oblivia Olivia!’ It became quite a joke.
Marjorie did occasionally go down the hill to meet Jack in the car off the Waterloo train when he was late and this was a quicker way home. She hated it—sitting in the station forecourt, a place nobody has ever loved (waiting-time mercifully restricted to ten minutes) watching the army of pale men emerge from the underground like souls from hell. Over the years she saw known faces growing greyer, lines between nose and mouth cut deeper, good suits become more expensive, less noticeable, briefcases more importantly battered. Some talked to themselves, head down, turning for the hill to walk, for health’s sake, home. ‘So alike,’ thought Marjorie. ‘Some day I’ll drive off the wrong one.’
‘Jack,’ she said. ‘I’m finished with down-the-hill. When you come home by train you’ll have to get a taxi.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh they are such awful people down there. Or else just those poor tired men.’
‘The country’s run by us. The poor tired men,’ he said. ‘You ought to thank God for us. We watch over governments, the tired men. And I suppose women. A few. We’re the protectors. Didn’t Cromwell live at The Crooked Billet?’
‘Nonsense. Cromwell was Huntingdon.’
‘It’s said.’
‘I expect it was Thomas. He probably once walked over the Common. You only have to have a cup of tea in Wimbledon for them to put up a blue plaque to you.’
‘There isn’t a blue plaque for a Cromwell.’
‘I don’t suppose dear old Wimbledon ever heard of either Cromwell while he was alive. It’s always been pretty private.’
The Crooked Billet is the pretty, countrified pub near the green end of Rathbone Road. It faces a famous seventeenth century house—famous of course only within the enclave: protected from general acclaim—which never has its windows washed and where there are said to be Rembrandts. It is alongside the site of a mansion pulled down the year Livie was born where Pitt the Younger used to spend his country weekends. Pitt the Younger, like Jack Partridge and the hosts of the grey-faced men on the underground, is on record as saying that he would have cracked without the blessedness of Wimbledon Common at weekends. It stretched gently then, unchangingly, to Roehampton, smelling of hay and flowers as it does still. ‘Thank God for the Common,’ Jack would say, whistling up the dog. ‘Coming, Livie?’ and they would walk to the windmill and down into the woods. ‘It sparkles,’ said Livie on a windy, watery day. ‘Like a Corot,’ said her father, and Livie nodded. At eight she knew what a Corot was.
The woods had a pool in them called Queensmere where Wimbledon gentlemen (Jack had not met any of them) were allowed to bathe naked before eight o’clock in the morning. It was all very respectable and sylvan, and the three Partridges laughed about it sometimes for fun. But Livie, writing of it in an essay for Miss Phillips, ‘The Place Where I Live’, had this part crossed out in broad, green ink.
Queensmere after that, a murky place, was bewildering to her. She couldn’t like it anyway because quite soon after the essay her father had told her that someone—some ‘poor, uncertain lady’—had drowned herself there long ago. ‘It was winter. They found her in the morning and her hair was spread out in spikes, frozen in the ice. Unpleasant business.’ Jack was a Wimbledonian—born in the enclave. He knew the legends.
‘I never told you that,’ he said years later. ‘It was your mother I told. “Uncertain lady”—really Olivia! As if I’d say that to a child.’
But he often tended to get his two women mixed up.
On June the fifth every year a Fair comes to Wimbledon Common and you can hear its thump and beat as far away as Putney Hill. First come the big caravans, shuttered and huge. They arrive by night, as they have done perhaps since Pitt the Younger. One morning they are found resting there like birds from Africa. For two days they sleep, then spring to life the third evening, blazing and blaring and whirling with lights like musical fireworks. The ring of houses of the enclave sits darkly by, for the Fair people have nothing to do with the people of the enclave (their evening customers come from Tooting, even Streatham) and the enclave pretends that the Fair is not there, even when the lights play over their faces as they lie in bed. For two weeks the flickers and strains of the Zharooms and the Bumpums and the Tunnel of Love and the wonderful Golden Horses (‘Rode by all with Pride’) take charge of the Common’s central platform near the War Memorial as they did the day Marjorie brought Olivia home in her arms from the hospital run by the excellent nuns. For years Olivia thought that the Fair was some demonstration in honour of her birthday and had been so old when she had realised that this was not so (maybe ten—even eleven) that she blushed to think of it.
At eleven Olivia did not go away to Sherborne School after all as she won a magnificently important scholarship to a famous London day school. The decision to accept it had been entirely hers, said the Partridges, and she was doing special subjects there—Greek, Russian—in no time at all. ‘It seems young,’ they said. ‘But the school think she’s up to it. We don’t interfere.’ She was keeping up her Music too—begun at Mrs. Parsons’s—and attending the Royal College in Marylebone on Saturday mornings. On Sundays for nearly a year, she took Confirmation classes, and then did voluntary work through the local church—there was an old lady she went to see in Bathgate Road and a spastic boy in The Drive. ‘My dear, we never see her,’ her mother said to friends at lunches. Jack, dining in Geneva or Berlin, said, ‘Yes. One girl. No—London day school. More in touch we think. Doing Russian—and it’s to be Chinese next I hear. Yes—very young. Well—Cambridge, we rather hope.’
But he never boasted,
was never excessive, never mentioned Olivia without being asked. Marjorie, digging her Brussels sprouts or writing a little monograph on George Eliot at Southfields for the Wimbledon Lit. and Sci. (Literary and Scientific Society, founded 1891) was sensible likewise. She would smile down at her spade or out of the study window at the gate, watching Olivia coming home (she looks tired, thought Marjorie, but you do look tired in your O level year)—Marjorie would smile and indulge in quick fantasies that it would be Oxford Olivia plumped for—that her first term, leaves falling, green lawns, sloping to the river—she would settle Olivia in at her own old college. Perhaps into her own old room.
Livie didn’t do particularly well in the O Levels, though the school said that this hardly mattered. O Levels are no test of a mind. Marjorie and the Headmistress had quite a smile about how much better some of Livie’s contemporaries had done with not a tenth of Livie’s brilliance. Livie proceeded to Russian, Greek and Mathematics at Advanced Level. She continued her Music. Her piano playing was now astonishing. ‘I wouldn’t say exactly concert standard,’ said Marjorie, laughing as if she were lying a little. Livie took on secretaryships of many societies and became Head Girl. She organised dances to which boys were invited, though she did not meet any of them socially—or dance. She stood gravely by the disco looking beautiful but in heavy, low-heeled shoes.
She looked tireder—but no wonder. Marjorie took to making lightning dashes to the school to fetch her home—sometimes finding that there was a long wait when she got there. But she had the car radio and a heater and her petit-point. Often she found that she and Livie had missed each other and Livie was at home before her—head back, eyes shut on the porch seat having forgotten her keys. Livie was vague now about her time-table, vague even about where she had been. Marjorie gave up the petit-point at the school gate. Livie had never been enthusiastic about her mother coming to fetch her anyway. Not even at Mrs. Parsons’s.
‘Is she overdoing things?’ Marjorie wanted to ask the Headmistress. But Livie was seventeen. The Headmistress was statuesque and looked as if she had never needed a mother. Anyhow, Marjorie hated women who fussed to Headmistresses.
The Fair arrived during the Advanced Levels. It was louder than ever this year with some new and wilder variety of music. Marjorie—Jack was away—almost thought of moving up into London, near to the school during the examinations—perhaps to a private hotel—but Livie looked amazed. She was used to the Fair’s arrival during examination days. The noise was familiar to her, washed beautifully over her. It had never interfered with sleep or work. And it was part of her birthday. She opened her bedroom windows wide and the night before the Greek Unseen paper Marjorie went up with milk and glucose to find Livie’s curtains flapping, books put tidily away and Livie not there. It was past ten o’clock. Livie came in after midnight.
‘Livie! Where were you?’
‘I went round the Fair.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes, Pride of the South. “Rode by all with Pride.” It says it in scrolls.’
‘Have you been in The Crooked Billet? Are you drunk?’
‘I’ve been to the Fair. The Golden Horses aren’t there. They’ve been smashed up. He said it would be too expensive to repair them. “Rode by all with pride.”’
‘Are you well? Are you all right?’
‘They were Italian,’ said Livie. ‘Very old. Lovely wrong grammar. All gone. It was vandals.’
But she seemed herself in the morning.
She did all right in the A Levels. All right. Nothing spectacular. There were some spectacular results that year and some girls were even given university places unconditionally. One of these girls was also found to be pregnant, not in favour of abortion and desirous of keeping the baby. Her mother—a Kensington woman—had a nervous breakdown and took herself off to the South of France, so that one unconditional university place was going to be wasted. ‘There are people with real problems,’ wrote Marjorie to Jack in Tokyo, and Jack went straight out and bought Livie some pearl stud earrings (Minimoto, like her mother’s) and wrote her a delightful letter saying how little he worried about her. She was splendid. She had to remember that she was a really splendid person. ‘For Oxford,’ he said (it was to be Oxford), ‘it is the entrance examination and the personal interview that counts. I confidently predict—and remember, Livie, I am not unastute at prediction though I dare say it is a thing I would only admit to you or your mother—I confidently predict that no tutor in his right mind could ever turn you down. You are very special.’ And he went on to talk about the economy of Japan.
He added a post-script. She was to remember the triviality of examinations. The hazards of being accepted by Oxbridge were to her trifling. The real assessments of her, the true tests of the brain were to come. Quality was after all—except for the bourgeois—only apparent after the first Degree, at postgraduate level. ‘So it won’t all be over by Christmas, old girl. Don’t think you’re at the end yet.’
The Partridges were parents in a million, loving, kind and good. They spoke eye-ball to eye-ball, man to man.
The Oxford entrance examination was still an autumn away and so Marjorie made a great point of seeing that Livie had some fun during the summer holidays. She arranged for her to go to some of the private dances in the enclave arranged by the Wives’ Fellowship. These were by invitation only to big houses in Marryat and Bathgate Road and even one in a quaint house over towards Raynes Park belonging to a woman married to a Greek (an unfortunate result of reading Modern Languages at Hull) but who was third-generation Wimbledon and a super girl. ‘One knows simply everyone at these dances,’ said Marjorie, ‘that’s what’s so nice, and if some of them speak in common voices and wear one earring one knows that it is just showing off. They’ll be sending their own children to Wives’ Dances one day. You could tell just to look at them—pink hair, earrings and the lot. As Robert Graves said in Goodbye to all That—and Robert Graves of course was born just off the Ridgway, down the road from Livie—you can always tell a gentleman. These young people were gents. It would have been none of them for example who had smashed the stone lions which had stood for a hundred years outside the vet’s in the High Street. Heaven alone knew who those people might be.’
Livie was writing something slowly across the kitchen window as her mother’s view of Robert Graves and the vet’s lions was being put forward. She had just come home from one of the dances—she always came home alone. She turned eyes of such desolation on Marjorie that Marjorie stopped laying the breakfast.
‘Livie?’
‘The vet’s lions,’ said Livie. ‘My God.’
‘Now Livie—’
‘My God.’
‘Aren’t you pleased that the people at the dance didn’t smash the vet’s lions?’
‘My God.’
‘Livie! They’ve been repaired by the John Evelyn Society.’
‘Do you see John Evelyn on the vet’s lions?’
‘Now Livie—Well, no Livie. No Livie, of course I don’t. They used to stand on some gateposts about then—Evelyn’s time—I believe. Some great house. I don’t think he actually lived in Wimbledon you know. Just passed through.’
‘A lot of them,’ said Livie. ‘Did that.’
‘The Thackerays would have known them of course. I expect Anne Thackeray must actually have sat on them. You all sat on them of course, all the children at Mrs. Parsons’s.’
‘Rode by all with pride.’
‘Livie—whatever’s wrong? Just get out the marmalade, would you? Swinburne must have known them of course. He’d have passed them every day on the way to The Rose and Crown before getting his newspaper from Frost’s. At the second door. Did you know, Livie—Frost’s had two doors. Until just last year when they pulled it down they called the second door “Mr. Swinburne’s door”. Isn’t it killing?’
‘Killing.’
‘Livie—’
But Livie had walked away.
‘Olivia’s getting a bit cantankerous—just a little bit difficult,’ wrote Marjorie to Jack. ‘It’s natural I suppose. We have been so lucky—and looking round we still are so lucky. Sometimes you might almost think it was something to do with this place, the disasters there are on all sides. And yet I’m sure there’s no place more caring. I suppose there is always disaster with the young. “Youth is a blunder”—Disraeli. Did I tell you about Michael B. in Bicester Crescent? He’s had something they call a breakdown (drugs?) and he’s in The Priory. Brilliant A Levels. He’s been sleeping rough on the Common.’ Later she wrote, ‘Those poor Smiths on Ridgway Hill. Ophelia has gone off to Tooting to live with an Iranian. She’s been in trouble with the police. She met him in this so-called wine-bar. And do you remember little Duffy Duff? Apparently he left Cambridge without a Degree. Went in to each exam and just walked out again. He’s so good they say they would have given him something if he had only written his name on the paper. All he wrote was ‘not to be classified’. Oh, isn’t it sad—do you remember him reciting that lovely little ballad at the end-of-term Christmas concert? He looked like a little angel himself. He’s helping to run a Meditation Centre in the Lake District now and when he rang his father up the other day to wish him happy birthday—which is something I suppose: Mrs. Parsons’s training!—he was talking in broadest Cockney! I don’t suppose anybody understands a word he says, especially in the Lake District. Oh how lucky we are with Livie.’
Livie, the day of the Oxford entrance papers, had the composure and quietness of the day she was born. Her tall figure in good skirt and jersey, her hair well cut—she went to Marjorie’s girl at Peter Jones—delighted some of her mother’s friends who passed her on the way to the bus. ‘Dear Livie,’ they said. ‘Her smile hasn’t changed since they were all at dancing class.’
‘I’d not say that,’ said Maureen, passing through the Partridges’ hall—jumble was being sorted—‘Keeps herself to herself. Always did. But I’ll not say she’s never changed. There’s different bits to Olivia. I’ll not forget when I used to take her to watch the Fair.’
